Tuesday, February 01, 2005

I'm so tired, and rest doesn't seem to be in the near future

I sprung to my feet with a lucidity I rarely achieve that early in the morning.

We weren't sure of these things, despite already having one child, because last time, my wife was two weeks overdue, was induced, and it was a beautiful, almost completely painless experience. However, since my wife hadn't gone into labor naturally last time, this was the first time it was occurring for us. We called the OB, who said to wait it out a little. The wife and I decided to try to go back to bed, and the next hour was filled with nocturnal halucinations mired in my mind mixed with my wife's agony as the pains began to increase. By 4 am, it was clear that the time had come. Then came the complicated part.

We called my sister in law to ask her to come to the hospital with us. Then we called my mother in law to drive all of us to the hospital. My sister in law ended up watching my daugher in the waiting room while child number 2 made ready to enter this world.

Baruch Hashem, the epidural worked. We've heard horror stories from my wife's friends of women who had the epidural but received no pain relief whatsoever from them, so you can bet we were davening hard that it would work. It did, and then things started coming together very quickly.

Within an hour and a half of the epidural being put it, my wife's water broke in the labor and delivery room. Half an hour later, she started transition. Ten minutes later, our second child, another girl, was born.

My older daughter (I'm still trying to get used to referring to her like that) was wound up like a top and barely slept all day today, keeping us chasing after her all throughout the maternity ward at Maimonides Hospital, and in the ride home, she fell asleep, and I expect her to wake up some time just before the start of 2006. :)

I'm home with daughter #1, and my wife plans to come home tomorrow from the hospital with daughter #2, and now we'll see how well the wife and I can juggle two kids, my shaky employment status, and a whole slew of other interesting things in the months ahead.